Explore This Section

The Origin of Husserlian Phenomenological Psychology and its Contemporary Promulgations

Author: Sean P. Biggins

December 16, 2014

Abstract

The author attributes the origins of phenomenological psychology to the philosophies
of Husserl and Heidegger. Next, the author summarizes the metamorphoses of psychology
in the wake of the so-called Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and
how these metamorphoses prepared for phenomenologys emergence in a milieu of phenomenal
inquiry in complement to a predominantly quantitative methodology. Then, the author
considers the reception of phenomenology by the Munich School (where Lipps psychologism
was followed) and explores the disagreement between psychologism considered more broadly
and phenomenology about the basis of logic. This leads to a discussion of the distinction
between psychological and philosophical phenomenology on the basis of the method of
reduction or bracketing employed. The author considers Husserls reflections upon the
implications of this distinction late in life and the development of the distinction
by other thinkers such as Sartre, who came to see phenomenologys value precisely in
supplying meaning to the empirical facts gained by psychology. Finally, the author
considers the present-day phenomenological psychologist Amedeo Giorgi and his effort
to establish a practical method for such psychology.

Mainstream psychology in todays contemporary intellectual field is quantitative and
concerned with the study of phenomena. Phenomenological psychology is in harmony with
mainstream contemporary in the latter respect but differs in qualifying such things
as meaning and analyzing experiences descriptively rather than treating mental phenomenon
extrinsically and measuring them. Phenomenology originated from Husserlian and Heideggerian
thought, although it was presaged by William James, and developed through contact
with the Munich school (among others) and further elaboration by figures such as Sartre.
Contemporary proponents of phenomenological psychology strive to gain wider acceptance
of the school through establishing its intellectual pedigree, the historical respectability
of qualitative research, and the need for such research. Phenomenological psychology
emerged from the changes in emphases of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and
exists as one of several schools offering a return to a more human method of studying
the human mind.

Psychology underwent two major shifts, the first of which was the shift from qualification
to quantification expressed in the shift from investigating consciousness philosophically
to investigating it experimentally. Originally, questions presently considered psychological
were investigated by many disciplines, among them philosophy, theology, law, and rhetoric.
According to Dan Robinson, psychology originated in Greece as the study of the soul
conducted systematically by such thinkers as Aristotle (2013). The scholastic thinkers,
notably Thomas Aquinas, carried on this method of inquiry through the Middle Ages.
This approach was concerned with qualities and metaphysical essences. The nature of
psychological inquiry changed dramatically in the wake of the so-called Scientific
Revolution of the seventeenth century. Psychologists, admiring the prodigious successes
of the natural sciences, strove to transpose psychology from natural philosophy to
natural science. Titchener and Wundt were among the vanguard of this effort and produced
the structuralist and volunteerist schools respectively (Giorgi, 2009). Other schools
such as the functionalist also existed. During this period Franz Brentano advocated
a redefinition of psychology as the study of mental phenomena to accommodate the natural
scientists. He also developed thoughts on an empirical psychological method as well
as revived the scholastic notion of intentional inexistence, which Husserl separately
developed into the notion of intentionality, that mental objects are directed toward
objects other than themselves (Giorgi, 2009, p. 17).

The second major shift in psychology occurred in the late nineteenth century with
the shift from studying consciousness to studying mental phenomena. Franz Brentano
argued that psychology, heretofore the study of the soul, needed to be redefined as
the study of mental phenomena (Brentano, 1874). He grounded this in the observation
thatgiven that the soul is unobservableboth those who believe in a metaphysical soul
and those who do not study the same mental phenomena. This redefinition would further
distinguish psychology from philosophy and better accommodate it conceptually to the
natural sciences.

It is worth noting that William James, who vocally called for the distinction between
psychology and metaphysics and for the redefinition of psychology as a natural science
in his Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science, anticipated many phenomenological themes in his writings (Giorgi, 2009). He affirms
that anything experienced deserved to be included in the scope of human inquiry, and
his analysis of the stream of consciousness in his Principles (1809) would later be compared to phenomenological description (Linschoten, 1968,
p. 59).

The phenomenological school of psychology derives from Husserlian and Heideggerian
philosophy. Husserls psychology developed from his philosophy and is differentiated
from it by the type of methodological reduction employed, as will be discussed later.
The contemporary Phenomenological school is a fundamentally qualitative school, which
distinguishes it from the mainline quantitative schools current today. It is concerned
with the meaning of mental phenomena rather than bare facts about them. As such the
school demands the practitioner to approach mental phenomena as a human capable of
considering them sympathetically. This distinguishes it methodologically from the
natural sciences, which, as Daston (1999) notes, presently aspire to view phenomena
from an objective, aperspectival vantage point.

As Husserlian phenomenology disseminated, it passed from Husserls own Gttengen to
numerous others schools, Munich among them. Husserls phenomenology helped orient many
of the Munich students, such as Thedor Conrad, Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach, and
Moritz Geiger, against psychologism, especially that of their teacher, Theodor Lipps
(Frchette, 2012, p. 156). Psychologism treats empirical psychology as first philosophy,
which means that logic, ethics, and aesthetics in such a system must be founded on
empirical psychological findings (Scanlon, 1997, p. 572). The Munich phenomenologists
acceptance of Husserlian thought and their estrangement from their teacher prompted
the so-called 1905 Munich Invasion of Gttengen, in which the phenomenologists defecting
from Lipps invaded Gttengen to dialogue extensively with Husserl and his pupils (Frchette,
2012, p. 159). Nonetheless, it is important to note that the Munich philosophers did
differ from Husserl in some respects: they emphasized the meanings of expressions
before all else, they had a particular notion of ideal objects, and they disagreed
entirely on the relevance of sensations to phenomenal analysis (Frchette, 2012). At
any rate, both the Gttengen and Munich schools agreed that psychology need be distinguished
from philosophy.

The phenomenological conception of logic presents a striking contrast to the conception
of the proponents of psychologism. They believed that logic is grounded in mental
operations such that mental entities are equivalent to logical objects. In contrast,
phenomenologists declared that mental entities are not equivalent to logical objects1 (Seebohm, 1997). Husserls effort to distinguish logic from human mental life is complementary
to William James discussion of the stream of consciousness, which demonstrates that
human thought does not proceed according to logical deduction. All mental entities
possess a fringe of associations, to use James (1981) terminology, from which their
meanings derive. As human thought is not constrained by logic and as logical objects
need not possess a fringe of associations, the conception of logic in psychologism
must be deficient.

A twofold change in psychology took place in the late nineteenth century: the investigative
methods of the physical and biological sciences were christened for psychology, and
lines of inquiry previously open to psychology were reserved for philosophy. Phenomenology
is noteworthy for its emphasis on qualitative phenomena. As Giorgi (2009) notes, psychologists
looked admiringly at the great success of the physical sciences in the seventeenth
century and sought to emulate the evidently potent method in psychology. Examples
of the appeal for such a science are evident from figures such as William James in
his Plea he opines that almost all the fresh life that has come into psychology of recent years
has come from the biologists, doctors, and psychical researchers and therefore that
their impulse to constitute the scienceas a branch of biology, were an unsafe one
to thwart (1892, p. 149). James also notes that in Ceasing to put herself forward as philosophyshe has disarmed the jealousyof the transcendental philosopher (1892, p. 150). Indeed,
James describes the movement in which phenomenology was implicated. Husserl in his
second edition of the Logical Investigations ceased to dub his philosophy descriptive psychology and the Munich school of phenomenologists
rejected the psychologism of their teacher, Lipps (Frchette, 2012).

In this vein, it is necessary to note Husserls distinction between his philosophy
and his psychology on the basis of their differing methods of bracketing of experience.
Psychological phenomenology uses a psychological-phenomenological reduction in which
the object of experience is bracketed and its existence is not predicated. In contrast,
philosophical phenomenology entails a transcendental reduction that posits the existence
of the object of consciousness. It is worth noting that Husserl explicitly described
the affinity of his idealism to Neo-Kantian transcendentalism (Schuhman and Smith,
1993), which explains the reduction method he employed for philosophy.

Late in life Husserl concluded that that his method of psychological phenomenological
reduction would eventually collapse into transcendental reduction, which meant that
phenomenological psychiatry would be subsumed into transcendental phenomenology, a
movement endorsed by Eugen Fink. Another phenomenologist, Strasser, viewed phenomenological
psychology as a field distinct from phenomenological philosophy or empirical psychology.
By his account it is a certain conception of empirical psychology that can be justified
philosophically by phenomenological philosophy in distinction from the psychologies
of Wilheim Wundt, Carl Stumpf, John Watson, and Max Wetheimer (Kockelmans, 1997, p.
532).

Sartre, as opposed to Husserl, Finsk, and Strasser, insisted that phenomenological
psychology was a distinct field from empirical natural scientific psychology and that
its value lay in providing the human meaning of the facts studied empirically. Sartre
distinguished phenomenological psychology from philosophy on the basis of the regressive
character of the psychology and the progressive character of the philosophy. By this
he meant that psychology has a regular recourse to the domain of the empirical and
that philosophy, the study of the human essence, cannot be verified by a recourse
to empirical facts (Kockelmans, 1997, p. 532-33).

A contemporary psychologist, Amedeo Giorgi, articulates a Husserlian phenomenological
methodology for psychology with a particular emphasis on the value of its qualitative
approach. He takes pains during his first chapter, in which he gives a history of
the development of psychology, to demonstrate that many figures, even those such as
Wundt, did not deny the importance of qualitative research even as they encouraged
the adoption of novel experimental research methods (2009). Giorgi uses the approval
of personages, some of them traditionally considered champions of quantitative research,
given to qualitative research to authoritatively support his claim that quantification
and qualification are complementary activities equally appropriate and necessary to
psychology. His later chapters systematically ground this claim in the scientific
phenomenological methods research process, its philosophical context, its structure,
and its application. He identifies the two major distinguishing principles of phenomenology
to be the premise that intuitions are to be treated as legitimate sources of cognition
and to be accepted simply as they present themselves, and the use of the method of
free imaginative variation, which permits fictive and not merely factual information
to be considered. Giorgi takes great care to emphasize that phenomenology is not opposed
to quantitative research. Rather, he explicitly identifies his method as a corrective
to an imbalance in contemporary psychology.

The relationship between phenomenological psychology and experimental psychology need
not be antagonistic. As noted above, Sartre believed that phenomenology could give
meaning to the otherwise cold empirical facts. Indeed, one of the great crises of
contemporary times perhaps the crisis is the loss of a sense of meaning in human life. Additionally, scholars in
science studies have become increasingly aware that even the purest and hardest of
the natural sciences have an ineradicably human character. One can never fully step
outside of ones perspective as a human or the social relationships and intellectual
commitments that this entails. If this must be remembered for even the hard sciences,
then how much more so must it be remembered for the study of the human mind. Phenomenology
is not capable of completely curing the contemporary crisis of meaning or the idealization
of an unattainable, aperspectival objectivity, but insofar as it assuages either ailment,
it performs an inestimable good for our world.

1 Take the famous syllogism: Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore Socrates
is mortal. One may replace the meaningful words Socrates, man, and mortal with the
symbols S, M, and P without disrupting the logic of the syllogism (S is M. M is P.
Therefore S is P.) This is because logic (and Mathematics for that matter) expresses
relationships among undefined objects of thought. Thus, these objects may function
perfectly well in logic without having meaning attached to them by the fringe of association.

News

"You bring me a letter of acceptance to a Catholic school for your child, and I promise your child will attend Catholic school." This is the promise Father Mark Hamlet, BA '68 MBA '70, makes to his congregation at every Mass. The pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Austin, Hamlet has spent much of his ministry advocating for Catholic school education through his nonprofit foundation, Our Kids at Heart.

This past summer, Yeabkal Wubshit, BA '20, earned the internship that every computer science major dreams of: a position at Google -- and spent the summer working on infrastructures for Google Service Accounts at Google's office in Sunnyvale, California.

The University of Dallas will celebrate the extraordinary achievements of four alumni with its 2019 Distinguished Alumni Awards. Award recipients Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, MTS '00, Laura Felis Quinn, BS '86 MBA '18, Judy Kelly, BA '63, and John Parker, BA '83 MBA '89, will be honored for their contributions to their professions, communities and the University of Dallas.

The University of Dallas is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. The university does not discriminate against individuals on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, genetic information, protected veteran status, age, or disability in the administration of its employment practices.